Sunset Song, Terence Davies's long-awaited project based on the Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel, is set to finally go into production, Variety reports.

According to producer Bob Last, the film is now casting, with a view to beginning shooting at the end of this year or the start of 2013 in Scotland and Sweden.

Last produced The House of Mirth for Davies in 2000 – that film was the highest-grossing of his career – and is planning to co-finance the film with Hurriance Films, the outfit behind Of Time and the City, Davies's acclaimed black-and-white documentary about the Liverpool of his youth.

Set in the early 20th century, Sunset Song begins – as did Davies's most recent film, The Deep Blue Sea – with a suicide attempt: that of a poverty-stricken woman in Scotland, broken by repeated childbirths, who kills herself and poisons her baby twins. The novel follows one of the woman's daughters, who must manage the farm in her mother's absence and after her father, who has a stroke, becomes bedridden (though also eager for an incestuous relationship).

The tough subject matter of Sunset Song had apparently made the project hard to source funding for. In 2006, Davies told the Guardian that the UK Film Council had withdrawn backing at the last minute.